


Epicycles

by wombuttress



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 06:15:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10938678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wombuttress/pseuds/wombuttress
Summary: Tabris. Four deaths. A life.





	Epicycles

**Author's Note:**

> well i sure wrote this all in one go in the middle of the night but thats just how it is sometimes

The Grey Warden, a young shemlen nobleman with a gaunt face and dark hair, had freed her from Howe’s dungeon. Tabris had trusted him as far as she could throw him—given her depleted state following a year’s stint in the cell, not very far, not very far at all—but she surmised, at least, that he was not the absolute _worst_ sort of shemlen scum.

Now he is here in her alienage, where Tabris has barely had time to recover, barely had time to embrace her family and assure them (falsely) of her well-being, before venturing out to join Shianni in the crowd around the Tevinter shemlen. The bags under her eyes are visible even through the dark tattoos, and her body weight has dropped by at least a third, but she keeps her mother’s daggers strapped to her thighs and ignores Shianni’s pleading for her to go home.

How can she sit in her father’s house when this nightmare has invaded her home, when her father is gone and Soris sits listless and miserable in the empty building?

She nearly hisses and spits when she sees another shemlen approach, before slowly remembering that he helped her. He freed her. And now he is here to help them again.

For self-serving reasons, of course. All for their wretched shemlen power plays, all to get some dirt on Teyrn Loghain.

But he is here to do something about what’s happening.

Tabris goes with him.

If nothing else, he fights well, and leads even better. He doesn’t command _her,_ but his companions, certainly. She can see him shooting her glares as she ignores his shouted orders, and ignores that too.

Tabris does not fight nearly as well as she used to. She is slow, and weak, and flinches at everything, and as sweet as the screams of the slavers are as she buries her daggers in their eyes,  she knows she could be doing better.

She had slaughtered her way singlehanded through a whole palace of shems once before. Now…

The sight of her father— _her father!—_ crouched in a cage like an animal overwhelms her with such rage that it consumes the fear entirely. The ringleader is there and Tabris thirsts for his blood more intensely than she has ever wanted anything before.

The blood mage is powerful, but ultimately, not powerful enough—but before she can kill him, the Warden is yanking her back, and she is too weak, too tired to resist him. How dare he,  she thinks blisteringly, how dare he touch her.

And it is in this red haze of fury that she hears with her own knife ears the offer the slaver makes, and the bare seconds of consideration the Warden gives it before agreeing.

She does not think before  lunging for him, and even manages to pluck out one of his eyes before she is impaled on his indifferent longsword.

With blood on her lips and blistering hatred in her throat, Tabris dies.

\--

The darkspawn fall beneath her blades, but it won’t matter in the end. This is all a formality.

What irony, Tabris thinks, to dodge her promised Blight-death not once, but twice—only to have it take her after all now.

Such things she had survived. The Joining. The bloody _Archdemon._ All the battles and horrors life had thrown at her, and in the end she still could not escape.

To think she had once tried to run from an obligation as petty as an arranged marriage.

As though any measure of her dutifulness would have made a difference. She had left them. _Race traitor,_ they’d called her. They did not want her, though they needed her. And so she had turned to the Wardens.

She is the greatest Grey Warden to ever have lived, and wave after wave of darkspawn fall before her might.

But there will always be more. More even being birthed now, this very moment, in the wretched depths of these Deep Roads—she knows, she has seen it. She has killed broodmother after broodmother, and they will always make more from the bodies of her Wardens.  They will die in that horrific way and in others—up on the surface, to the Joining, to darkspawn, to the Blight. All because she had failed.

But then, she thinks, cutting down another one, what hadn’t she failed at? Failed to keep the only other damned Warden in Ferelden with her to face the Blight, lover or no love. Failed to save her friends at Vigil’s Keep, walls or no walls. Failed to cure the Calling, failed to save _any_ of them.

She feels vaguely, even now at the end of everything, that something must have gone terribly wrong, all those years ago. This isn’t meant to be her life. This isn’t how it was meant to happen.

Her armor is now so stained with darkspawn blood that blue and silver have both turned to black. The blood burns on her skin, and she relishes the feeling.

She supposes that she’d done her best.

Foolish to expect that luck and determination would have carried her for long.

Eventually the darkspawn start getting lucky. They are tireless, and she is not. She is dying, and they are not.

Tabris succumbs.

\--

By the end of the Warden Civil War, Tabris holds the broken silverite blade high over her head and shouts and snarls until they are bending the knee to her. It has been a long and bloody and utterly pointless little war, and Tabris has put an end to it.

It’s as though nobody can do _anything_ without her babysitting them.

Tabris is done.

They expect her to lead them. To be their new First Warden. To give them whatever is left of her.

Fuck that.

She throws done the silverite sword, and walks away. The crowd of bloody, bruised Wardens parts around her silently. Even now, even after everything, she still holds their respect. Every wretched traitorous one of them.

The great Grey Warden who has ever lived. Living defeater of an Archdemon. Destroyer of the Blight. Finder of the Cure.

And what had any of it meant?

She walks right past the crumbling silver gates of Weisshaupt. The desert spreads out endlessly before her. Tabris keeps walking.

How much of her life, how much of her soul, had she given to the Grey Wardens? She had abandoned her home, her family. She had bled for them, fought for them, built fortresses and armies for them, forged silverite chains for herself until the chains had become the only thing holding them up.

Now her Warden husband is dead. Her Vigil’s Keep Wardens are gone, scattered to the four winds. Her own kin, lost to her.

Tabris keeps walking.

She is not even physically a Warden any longer. The Blight does not pollute her veins. It is as though she was never a Warden in the first place.

One by one, the strings have snapped and cut and floated away.

Weisshaupt fades behind her, and is quickly obscured by the dunes.  No one comes after her.

Tabris walks through the desert, choking on bitter regrets, until she cannot walk anymore. Her knees hit the hot sand, then her face.

Fuck this, she thinks, her mouth full of sand, her lungs burning. She wonders what will take her first—dehydration, exposure? Wild animals? Demons?

Well, it hardly matters.

Tabris is done.

\--

Tabris surveys the new recruits, bright young boys and girls, resplendent in silver and blue and looking younger every year. Vigil’s Keep teems with them, now that the Joining is no longer fatal, and they are every one of them cowed by her mere presence.

They all know what she had done, half an age ago. The first impossibility she would accomplish out of a lifetime of many. What green recruit would not be gobsmacked by the woman who had survived not only an Archdemon, but the Blight in her own blood?

The awe of her subordinates has been a constant, and one that has never ceased to amuse her. She had never been tall, even for an elf, and age had shrunk her even more, fading the harsh tattoos around her eyes and softening all her sharp edges. Her younger self would have hated that.

But Tabris is content with the life she has made, the person she has become.

She dismisses the recruits with a terse nod, suppressing an indulgent smile. They break and scatter like a gaggle of nervous birds, hurried away by a Warden-Constable to their afternoon’s exercises. Though she still holds the title of Warden-Commander—nobody ever dared suggest she retire—the truth is that the Keep runs quite smoothly without her.

Of course it does. That’s how she’s arranged it.

She ambles into the Great Hall, where her great oaken desk, worn now from decades of heavy use, has stood since she had it dragged in to replace that ridiculous throne. She doesn’t walk so well these days, her joints complaining of every jostle, but nobody offers her help—they know she won’t accept it. She settles into the squashy, oversized armchair, and immediately one of the Warden recruits is by her elbow, querying whether she needs anything. Another offers her her pipe. They seem to be ever present these days, materializing out of nowhere to hover around her like eager-to-please grandchildren around the stern family matriarch.

Which, Tabris supposes, is exactly what she is.

She gruffly shoos them away, her heart clenching warmly at the sight of them all. Her husband has long since passed, and so too have her cousins, and her dearest friends. Their children are grown now, and do not need their godmother so much anymore. These squirrelly recruits are all she has left to care for.

She hopes she has cared well for them.

Her eyesight is not so good these days either, even with the Orzammar-made glasses she wears. Nonetheless, she signs paperwork all afternoon, sorting through letters and addresses and requisitions and all the petty drudgery of the running of the Keep. Her seneschal, a much younger woman, is perfectly capable of handling all that for her, but Tabris likes to keep her finger to the pulse of her household.

She grows tired around sundown, letting the quill fall from her gnarled fingers. She sits back in her chair and relights her pipe. She can hear the clang of metal on shield in the practice fields outside, the shouting of the sergeants, the youthful whooping of overeager combatants. A soft spring breeze floats in through the open doors, carrying the fragrance of blooms and new life. The falling sunlight stains everything a hazy orangey-pink.

Tabris sets her pipe down and closes her eyes, leaning her head on her shoulder.

Yes, it had been a good life.

Tabris rests.

**Author's Note:**

> In case anyone was confused:  
> 1 - never recruited  
> 2 - recruited, cocked up the end of both games, did not have sufficient support to find the cure  
> 3 - found the cure, alistair left in the fade  
> 4 - "canon" timeline
> 
> [my tumblr](http://wombuttress.tumblr.com/)   
>  [my oc blog](http://pile-of-dragon-filth.tumblr.com/)


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